Low-latency collaboration between conservatoires
Conventional wisdom acquired during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020-2021 dictates that while everyday video conferencing systems work well for dialogue, they spell disaster for music. Although this holds true for home broadband connections, the majority of HE institutions across Europe and North America already use high-speed internet service provision capable of supporting low-latency musical collaboration.
Project lead: David Gleeson (Head of Recording)
This project aims to communicate to music teachers, students, and industry professionals that what was previously considered impossible during lockdown is now not only achievable but also readily available.
It builds on a series of small-scale collaborations between the Royal Academy of Music and other conservatoires, allowing musicians to play together online in real-time without the need for extensive technical setup times or engineering staff present. The case for real-time distance collaboration between conservatoires continues to grow – environmentally, economically, and in simple terms of productivity.
Networked Music Performance (NMP) “occurs when a group of musicians, located at different physical locations, interact over a network to perform as they would if located in the same room.” (Lazzaro and Wawrzynek, 2001: 157). A growing catalogue of high-profile, high-budget, and high-concept productions has established NMP’s success over the past few decades.
Examples include the Virtual Conservatoire (RAM, RCM, LAMDA, RADA, BoVTS, CSB 2017), Infinite Bridge (NPAPW 2015), and The Online Orchestra (Falmouth University 2016). Yet critically, none of these are within reach of our everyday lives. This became painfully apparent during the Covid-19 lockdowns when musicians sought to work together online and found it impossible. To this day “…informal applications of NMP have been largely ignored in research, in favour of high-speed, low latency systems or large-scale public performances.” (Iorwerth, 2023: 14).
During the same lockdown period, a revolution took place as Skype, Teams and Zoom transformed our lives, overcoming distance and social isolation to bring us together in sound and vision. Given that NMP and video conferencing rely upon near-identical technology, what prevented musicians from using this technology at home?
There are two fundamental problems. Firstly, latency, or more simply, time-lag; small pauses which feel annoying but tolerable in video chats turn out to be catastrophic for musical synchronicity. Scientific explanations aside, the practical solution involves working within a finite geographical distance (roughly 1,500km). Secondly, home broadband cannot deliver the necessary data speeds to manage latency, hence institutional connections are needed.
Significantly, the Academy and several of its peers already have working solutions in place. Thanks to Jisc, the UK’s HE internet service provider, the Academy gained a dedicated high-speed research and education connection in 2023. Within weeks, our first low-latency performance - between the Academy and the the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, MdW) - was up and running. This experiment established proof-of-concept with two musicians performing Reich’s Clapping Music 1,100km apart.
Professor Neil Heyde then suggested that Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello (1922) might make an exacting piece for our next experiment; his essay ‘Exploring Playing Relationships in Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello’, written when musicians were striving to play together at the height of lockdown, provides excellent insights as to why (Heyde, 2022).
MdW postgraduate cellist, Constantin Siepermann, and Academy MMus violinist, Basil Alter, both agreed to participate, despite never having met, let alone worked together before. Although there had been some scepticism at first, the video shows just how far they had come by their last session: fully up to speed and thoroughly enjoying the Duo's fourth movement. It is a remarkable testament to their abilities and the technology that brought them together.
Basil Alter (violin) and Constantin Siepermann (cello) perform 1300km apart
This success promises to allow NMP between conservatoires to become as easy to use and readily available as any Teams, Zoom, or Skype call. But for this to become a reality, much more work is needed, not least to overcome an inertia stemming from so many painful, failed attempts by musicians to collaborate online during Covid-19 lockdowns. The ‘Distance Ensemble’ project will build on pilot projects to produce further small-scale interactions between conservatoires with musicians playing together online in real-time, without the need for extensive technical setup times or the presence of engineering staff.
The objective is to create an environment in which research into the educational and creative possibilities of NMP may be conducted by musicians, with minimal technical support. Although an impressive body of theoretical work already exists (Rottondi, Chafe, Allocchio, Sarti, 2016), even post-pandemic there’s been a conspicuous absence of regular, small-scale, practical application. Instead, “…research has focused on the challenges of unprepared musicians being forced into working online rather than the creative opportunities of NMP or projects that were specifically designed to be online from the outset.” (Iorwerth, 2023).
‘Distance Ensemble’ will gather data according to the 'Playing Together, Apart Framework' (Iorwerth and Knox, 2022; Iorwerth, 2023) to inform subsequent studies of NMP, particularly as it pertains to 1:1 collaboration at a high level of musicianship within conservatoires.
References
Heyde, N. (2022). A “Naked Violin” and a “Mechanical Rabbit”: Exploring Playing Relationships in Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello (1922). In Mine Doğantan-Dack (ed.), The Chamber Musician in the Twenty-First Century (pp. 229-260). MDPI. https://doi.org/10.3390/books978-3-03897-563-2-10.
Iorwerth, M. (2023). Networked Music Performance. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003268857.
Iorwerth, M., and Knox, D. (2022). The Playing Together, Apart Framework: A framework for communication in networked music performance. Journal of Music, Technology and Education, 15(2-3), 149-164. https://doi.org/10.1386/jmte_0....
Lazzaro, J., and Wawrzynek, J. (2001). A Case for Network Musical Performance. Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video. Association for Computing Machinery, 157-166. https://doi.org/10.1145/378344.378367.
Rottondi, C. Chafe, C. Allocchio, C and Sarti, A. (2016). An Overview on Networked Music Performance Technologies. IEEE Access, 4, 8823-8843. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2016.2628440
Image credit: Barra Liddy